Welcome to Grind Well. It’ll be a daily-ish blog about my daily-ish practice of mindfulness meditation, which I’ve learned from a mixture of Jewish and Buddhist sources and teachers, and which I’ve at least tried to maintain for the latter third of my approximately 31 years of life.

While I’ve written plenty about mindfulness before, I’m launching this project now both to recommit myself to disciplined practice and to explore new dimensions of it.

Burning Man Comms Presenting at ComNet18 in San FranciscoBurning ManJon MitchellFri, 25 May 2018 16:35:46 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/burning-man-comms-presenting-at-comnet18-in-san-francisco50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:5b08387e88251bc59ba04df7Dominique “Yung Manager” Debucquoy-Dodley and I will be presenting at
ComNet18, “the communications conference of consequence,” in San Francisco
sometime between October 10 and 12, 2018. Our session is entitled, “Empower
Your Audience by Handing Them the Mic.”

Dominique “Yung Manager” Debucquoy-Dodley and I will be presenting at ComNet18, “the communications conference of consequence,” in San Francisco sometime between October 10 and 12, 2018. Our session is entitled, “Empower Your Audience by Handing Them the Mic”:

Over the last 30 years, the Burning Man community has evolved in countless ways. The people who are actively engaged and invested in its global culture are often the ones best equipped to talk, write about, and document it. Three decades of changing, user-generated culture have taught us that sometimes the most caring and effective role we can play as communicators is that of facilitators. In this session, we will explore how creating platforms for our audiences to tell their own stories not only empowers individual voices, it also creates a stronger sense of community and helps us stay connected to the trends we may not otherwise know about.

Key Takeaways:

The importance of listening to and learning from your audiences (as opposed to speaking at them).

How to create channels for community-inspired content and conversations.

How giving our audiences room to tell their stories is sometimes more powerful than communicating our messages through traditional, top-down channels.

Drew Coffman and I have been internet friends since 2012. It was a whole different internet back then. We just launched a podcast about what’s changed, where it’s going, and what it’s doing to our always-online society.

Drew and Jon’s internet friendship began with this no-longer-extant live video chat… show… thing on April 19, 2012. Internet friendship has changed dramatically since then. In this episode, they trace the histories of their internet selves from the pseudonymity of forums and AIM through their first forays onto social media, the dramatic transformation caused by discovering Twitter, and… *sigh*… what’s happened to the internet since then. They consider the link between creativity and conversation, the place-ness of online places, what happens to society when the town square gets trashed, and the loss of online intimacy everywhere except for podcasts — hence, this podcast.

Subscribe to Internet Friends:

Internet Friends 1: How We Met on the InternetJudaism Unbound Episode 78: Burning ManBurning ManJon MitchellMon, 14 Aug 2017 20:26:30 +0000http://www.judaismunbound.com/podcast/2017/8/7/episode-78-burning-man-jon-mitchell-allie-wollner50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:599201ae4c0dbf7d0f00afdeJudaism Unbound is a show I’ve been following for a while. It’s the most
outside-the-box Judaism podcast I know about, and the most broadly
relevant. Any kind of group or organization trying to find its way into the
21st century can benefit from the deep inquiry Dan and Lex are doing into
Judaism to that end, as deeply Jewish as their inquiry is.
This year, they decided to do a topical miniseries about Burning Man in the
run-up to the event to try to figure out why so many Jews are into it and
what Judaism could learn from us, what we do out there, and why. I was
honored to be a guest on the introductory episode to that miniseries, along
with my friend, Allie.Judaism Unbound is a show I’ve been following for a while. It’s the most outside-the-box Judaism podcast I know about, and the most broadly relevant. Any kind of group or organization trying to find its way into the 21st century can benefit from the deep inquiry Dan and Lex are doing into Judaism to that end, as deeply Jewish as their inquiry is.

This year, they decided to do a topical miniseries about Burning Man in the run-up to the event to try to figure out why so many Jews are into it and what Judaism could learn from us. I was honored to be a guest on the introductory episode to that miniseries, along with my friend, Allie.

I thought it was a great conversation. My closing remarks on the show pretty much sum up my thoughts on the subject:

Burning Man is for you. It is not a counterculture; it is a superculture, and you are there, and your people are there — and I hope that everyone finds a place that feels the way Black Rock City feels for themself and for their people and for their culture. It’s one that reminds you why you wake up in the morning every day and why you go to sleep every night. There are things about an experience that profound that are terrifying, but we know that. Jewish people know that, and we face that, and we remember that on purpose because it is important in our growth to face that.

That’s the reason I keep going. It’s the reason everyone I know keeps going, and it’s not the reason why most of them go for the first time. But like I’ve said, Burning Man is not an event; it is a superculture, and being a part of it is something that can look any number of different ways. Find your tribe, and be a part of it, and be an active participant in it and an active creator of it, and you’re doing it already.

GigaLaw RedesignAblaze.coJon MitchellWed, 17 May 2017 12:32:36 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/gigalaw-redesign50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:591c3bbea5790aaa70de116eI built my first law firm website for Doug Isenberg of GigaLaw, an Atlanta
attorney who specializes in domain names, copyright, and other online
branding issues.

I built my first law firm website for Doug Isenberg of GigaLaw, an Atlanta attorney who specializes in domain names, copyright, and other online branding issues.

Of course, with the Ossoff influence, it only made sense to bring in Dustin Chambers to do Doug’s new headshots. Working with childhood friends is definitely among the coolest parts of adulthood so far.

It was a significant migration, moving a site with three blog feeds and over 13,000 posts from a remotely hosted WordPress instance into Squarespace. On the whole, it went really smoothly. Like, I can’t believe how smoothly. The only part that posed a problem was that the WordPress version of the site didn't include the names of the three different blogs in the post URLs, so redirects were necessary. Generating the list of redirects was easy. Unfortunately, Squarespace has a 400kb limit on the file size of the redirect table you can provide them. At press time, they haven't yet made an exception for us, so redirects for old links to his 11-year-old Daily News blog don't go all the way back to the beginning. We're looking into alternative solutions.

That aside, the fact that Squarespace imported 13,000+ blog posts from WordPress without a hiccup was really damned impressive. For anyone who’s tired of the fiddliness and insecurity of WordPress and doesn’t need the flexibility, I can unhesitatingly recommend migrating to Squarespace.

Doug also took this opportunity to move from his old domain at GigaLaw․com to the extremely sweet domain, Giga.Law. It was fun to work with a client as geeky about domain names as I am (and way more knowledgeable about them in the eyes of the law). I find his whole line of work fascinating, and if I ever get into a branding jam, I know who to call.

]]>GigaLaw RedesignAccuracy Third S02E05: It Was Cold & It Was Very Blinky Out.Burning ManJon MitchellMon, 20 Mar 2017 12:33:36 +0000https://accuracythird.com/2017/03/08/s02-e05-it-was-cold-and-it-was-very-blinky-out/50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:58cfcb222e69cfea22ebda1bIt was a pleasure to be a guest on the canonical podcast of Burning Man’s oral history.

Burning Man’s Publisher, Jon, calls in to Accuracy Third from Israel, because that’s where he is. D-Day, Rex, & Beth hear a bit about Israel’s regional burn, Midburn, before we delve into the inner workings of the seasonal nature of being a Burning Man employee. Believe it or not, they’ve got a nonstandard corporate culture there. We also get a great story on how Black Rock City is objectively better than the streets of San Francisco, plus you’ll hear how you can get your very own job with the Burning Man Organization.

Jon Ossoff for CongressAblaze.coJon MitchellThu, 05 Jan 2017 14:32:50 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/jon-ossoff-for-congress50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:586df10359cc688e1a84b96aI built the website for my best friend's congressional campaign. This is
the beginning of something significant.

He and I started talking and writing about politics together when we were sophomores in high school, during the heady politics of George W. Bush’s first term. I can say for sure that I wouldn’t be where I am today without that collaboration, and now look at him — running for Congress!

I’m not going to sit here and brag about the guy’s accomplishments; go read his About page, and then you let me know if you think he’d make a good congressman.

Jon’s running in the district where he grew up, Georgia’s 6th. Rep. Tom Price (R) just gave up that seat to go be Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Trump only carried the district by one point, though, so Jon sees an opportunity to go snatch it back for the Democrats in the special election this spring. As exciting as that is, it’s not going to overshadow for me the mere fact that Jon Ossoff is running for Congress.

This was all meant to happen, we just didn’t know when or how. Jon and I spent a lot of time on the phone processing the 2016 presidential election together. It got pretty bleak at times. “What do we do???” was the refrain. I saw it become clear to Jon over a couple of weeks, first gradually, then suddenly: “This is the moment we’ve been preparing for,” he said on a recent morning (my time — after midnight his time), and he was not wrong. It was time for him to run for office and for me to help him do it.

I realized how real the dream was last night when I was hot-spotting in on my laptop from the back of a cab winding its way through Jerusalem, making last-minute adjustments to the campaign website on Slack with Ossoff and other childhood buddies Dustin Chambers (in Atlanta) and Daniel Schwartz (in Zürich), who did the media production for this launch. Jon’s right; we have been preparing for this. He came to his friends and said, “Hey, I’m gonna run for Congress. Can you help?”, and we just said, “Well, yeah! Sure!”

This is not political theater, this is the realest thing ever. That amazing holiday shot on the About page? I used to drive the lady on the right to school in the mornings. I used to drive the lady on the left crazy all the time hanging out at her house with her son, who is now running for Congress. This photo from the first campaign meeting in Atlanta? I’ve known most of these people since they were little children:

SQUAD GOALS: ACHIEVED. (NOT PICTURED: ME, BECAUSE I’M IN FREAKING ISRAEL. SCHWARTZ IS THE GUY CROUCHING IN THE GLASSES ON THE RIGHT, AND DUSTIN HAS HIS ARMS FOLDED IN FRONT. THE CANDIDATE IS IN THE MIDDLE THERE.)

You see, our friends are a hopeful, progressive, rather intelligent bunch. We don’t respond kindly to gaudy, self-interested, willfully ignorant presidents who really just want to be crowned king. It is our natural tendency to want to snatch back the first national election after such a president takes office. Leave it to Jon Ossoff to actually try. I couldn’t be prouder of him already.

I’m not just proud of him, I’m grateful to him. His decision to run is unquestionably good for America; he’s rather well qualified to be a freshman congressman, and he’s the kind of Democrat who gets a deserved endorsement from John Lewis calling him “committed to progress and justice.” But I’m grateful to Jon in a more personal way, too. He’s galvanized his whole tribe. He’s given us something to do to respond constructively to the political emergency in America: We can do everything in our power to get a good, talented person elected to national office.

So yeah, I did the website. Yes, it only took me two months to start consulting again, but this is different. First of all, this was pro bono, nights-and-weekends, and for my best friend. It was also my first political job, and I have to say, it was incredibly rewarding to design for that purpose, especially in collaboration with dear friends whose values I know and share. The Ablaze.co tagline says that I work for “clients who want to repair our world,” a reference to the 20ᵗʰ-century, social justice-oriented reinterpretation of the mystical concept of tikkun olam. I never thought of the U.S. House of Representatives as deserving of the sacred sense of that term until now. The world looked dark to me a few weeks ago. Thanks to Jon Ossoff, now there’s light streaming in.

]]>Jon Ossoff for CongressNew Job: Publisher at Burning ManBurning ManAblaze.coJon MitchellThu, 13 Oct 2016 19:09:40 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/new-job-publisher-at-burning-man50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:57fa1dcae4fcb5e6ab24bf90After contracting with Ablaze Interactions for three event cycles, Burning
Man Project has offered me a new employee position with the organization,
and I have accepted. This formalizes a transition that began in February.
My new title is publisher.

Since I’m going from de facto full-time to for-real full-time, Ablaze.co will be cutting back on client work. Thank you so much to all my clients, colleagues and friends who recommended my services and enabled me to support myself as a freelancer for three great years.

I have loved running a consultancy and working with such awesome clients and collaborators. I learned a ton. Three and a half years ago, I almost got my first content strategy job, but I wasn’t selected because I had no experience working with clients. That’s what sent me down the road to starting Ablaze Interactions, and only now do I realize how critical that experience was.

Working with clients on their own communication challenges requires a kind of translation — a skill I did not learn in my previous editorial work. Every client has its own vocabulary and mannerisms. Consulting for clients small, medium and large, I learned how to translate. After I landed Burning Man Project as my biggest client (by a lot), I realized this kind of translation is also needed to coordinate communications work across diverse teams within a single organization.

That was a nice day. (Photo by John Curley)

After three years consulting, I finally speak the languages of Burning Man Project’s many staff and volunteer teams, not to mention those of our participants. As publisher, my job is to set and uphold the standards of quality across all our public multimedia channels without compromising that diversity of voices.

It’s a common saying in this organization that if we’re doing our job right, no one should know we exist. I think that’s especially true on the Comm Team. Our team patch depicts the Man itself holding up that quintessential Burning Man communication tool, the bullhorn. The Man represents all of Burning Man: its participants, its volunteers and its staff. The bullhorn? That’s my team, and in the grand Burning Man tradition, that sucker’s just lying on the table, up for grabs by whoever wants to be the star of the show until someone else takes it away.

The metaphor breaks down (as all metaphors eventually do) when it comes to that quality piece. Every Burner knows the fun part of megaphone artistry is that it makes you sound like shit, loudly. Over the past few years, that charming-yet-ragged aspect of Burning Man Communications has changed alongside the structure of the organization itself. That’s why we built a new website and publication. Next up for renovation on the publisher’s list is the Galleries, followed by a deep rethink of the Jackrabbit Speaks email newsletter and its relationship to our [too] many other email channels.

While the event in Black Rock City remains the janky work-in-progress we’ve always known and loved, our organization and its work reach far beyond that event now. The output of our culture is worldwide and year-round, and the next phase of our development at Fly Ranch hasn’t even been invented yet! This is going to mean more growth and change on our team and in our organization, and I’m really happy my turn has come at this fascinating point in our history.

]]>New Job: Publisher at Burning ManWhy the Best Meditation App Is No App at AllIn Real LifeAppsJon MitchellTue, 11 Oct 2016 20:01:00 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/why-the-best-meditation-app-is-no-app-at-all50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:58bc5d35bf629aed77c6050aIf we don’t have our phone with us to take a picture, the experience isn’t
real. Meditation apps are also a double-edged sword like this.

There’s a maxim of the smartphone age, probably popularized by the 2009 book by Chase Jarvis: “The best camera is the one that’s with you.” Fancy cameras are expensive and complicated, and we don’t have good reasons to carry them around all the time. They may be the “best” cameras, but if they aren’t with us when something memorable is happening, the camera on our phone is better, at least for the purpose of that specific shot.

So the constant presence of our smartphone cameras have enabled this golden age of photography. But what else has happened? We’ve become obsessed with photographing every moment instead of living in it and experiencing it. If we don’t have our phone with us to take a picture, the experience isn’t real.

Meditation apps are also a double-edged sword like this. They support and motivate our practice, but then they become essential parts of it, so we struggle to practice without them. Photography is an external technology; we have to rely on outside tools for that. But meditation is an internal technology, so outside tools can easily become dependencies that threaten our practice.

A timer is a timer, a chime is a chime. Those don’t create dependencies on any particular way to do it, and you can create your own ad hoc substitutes, like a number of breaths, or when the sun hits a certain point in the room. But most meditation apps have features more complex than timers, and those have drawbacks. Analytics motivate us, like fitness trackers, but then they create the feeling of wasted effort if we can’t get our points. More content-heavy meditation apps, like ones that guide you or use particular sounds or images, insinuate themselves into your meditation. They don’t teach a practice you can do without them.

But meditation is an app in itself — a mind app. Focusing on your breath, mantra, counting, body scan, lovingkindness, these are all meditation software that we can install. But they don’t run out of batteries. They don’t require good reception of signals beamed into your head from a tower. All you need to use them is your own mind.

]]>Why the Best Meditation App Is No App at AllHello World: Computers. How Do They Work?AppsAblaze.coJon MitchellThu, 23 Jun 2016 17:29:12 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/hello-world50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:576c1b4f5016e1c124393ece

One of my first Macs of my very own.

I’ve decided to learn to program. I want to be a Swift programmer building on Apple’s platforms.

I’m going to chronicle this adventure at hello.ablaze.co, so you can follow along and offer me your words of wisdom. My only hope for this blog is that it puts me in deeper contact with the Apple developer world and generates new leads for me to follow in my studies. Maybe it’ll also be an interesting document of learning to code that will help others. And hey, maybe I’ll succeed, and then the story of how I became a programmer will already be written down.

After 13 years working on Burning Man’s technology, art, and communications teams, Will Chase — who has always preferred the job title Minister of Propaganda — has accepted an offer to join Maker Faire as their inaugural Director of Content and Community. This is the perfect job for him; he has a chance to do for Maker culture the same thing he did for Burner culture. I‘ve always thought of Will as a guardian of language, a keeper of the magic words that give life and form to Burning Man culture and community when they are spoken. Maker Faire is lucky to have him.

I‘ve been working for Will on staff for more than two years, and before that as a volunteer for four more. Two years before that, I was getting ready to go to Burning Man for the first time, reading newsletters from Will Chase to learn what I was getting myself into. I don‘t even know what a Burning Man without Minister Will Chase is like, but I’m sure gonna find out.

Will‘s departure from the Burning Man Project is the end of an era. Over in the Burning Man Journal today, I‘m grateful to have the opportunity to say thank you to Will, and to talk about what‘s changing on the Comm Team and my own job in his wake.

Welcome to the Burning Man Journal, Our New Paper of RecordBurning ManAblaze.coJon MitchellWed, 02 Dec 2015 00:02:09 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/burning-man-journal50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:565b1bcde4b0b80773a2badfIt is my pleasure to unveil the Burning Man Journal, the second Burning Man
website redesign on which Ablaze Interactions has had the honor of working.
As much as the burningman.org redesign mattered to me, the Journal is
closer to my heart. Volunteering on the Burning Blog was how I got my start
with the Burning Man organization.
When we launched burningman.org last year, we re-skinned the blog to match
and called it Voices of Burning Man, but that was just to buy time. As soon
as burningman.org was stable, we started a design process for a
full-fledged Burning Man web publication that would become the Burning Man
Journal. I couldn’t be more proud to show it to you.It is my pleasure to unveil the Burning Man Journal, the second Burning Man website redesign on which Ablaze Interactions has had the honor of working.

As much as the burningman.org redesign mattered to me, the Journal is closer to my heart. Volunteering on the Burning Blog was how I got my start with the Burning Man organization, and now I get to help take that publication to the next level.

When we launched burningman.org in 2014, we re-skinned the blog to match and called it Voices of Burning Man, but that was just to buy time. As soon as burningman.org was stable, we started a design process for a full-fledged Burning Man web publication that would become the Burning Man Journal. I couldn’t be more proud to show it to you.

The Burning Man Journal is now the paper of record, if you will, for all of Burning Man culture. Gone is the standard wall of reverse-chronological text that a blogging engine produces by default; now we have a visually driven, multi-dimensional canvas for laying out the Burning Man story.

The Journal has a front page that allows us to feature the key stories covering each aspect of what’s going on in our world right now, as well as section pages that enable more topically focused exploration. Our authors — most of whom are volunteers and participants, not Burning Man staff — are now more prominently featured with avatars and bios. And, best of all, our posts have been given a typographical overhaul that makes Burning Man stories more enjoyable to read than ever before.

Last year’s burningman.org redesign required input from all over the organization because all of our artistic, philosophical, and business objectives had to be reflected in it. The Journal was different, and as the only former journalist on the team, I had much more to offer this time around. This wasn’t my first redesign of a longstanding web publication, either; my experience with the ReadWriteWeb/ReadWrite relaunch was invaluable in figuring out how to do this. Once again, the main job with the content was to re-flow the extensive back catalog into new sections that reflect a changed organization’s new editorial mission.

The steward of that mission is Will Chase, Burning Man’s Minister of Propaganda and the person with whom I’ve worked most closely since he first asked me to blog for the Org in 2010. He deputized me as the blog’s managing editor in 2013, and now the two of us know every post on this blog backwards and forwards. We got to redraw the categories from the ground up, and I think we nailed it. Thanks to the outstanding implementation by our designers and engineers, we got a new feature that makes the whole topical structure of the blog make sense at last: sections.

Since WordPress allows blog categories to be nested, we were able to implement six parent categories as the sections of the Burning Man Journal, each with its own front page. That allowed us to give each subcategory its own definite topical home. Stories can be cross-listed in different sections, but the surrounding posts will give them a clear context depending on which section you’re reading. This accomplishes so many objectives at once for readers and for us alike.

Readers now have obvious destinations for finding and sharing stories about the Burning Man topics they’re looking for. Black Rock City is home to all stories about the temporary desert city where the event takes place. Burning Man Arts, now its own program of the Burning Man Project, will highlight the work of Burning Man artists all over the world. Global Network is the section of the Journal dedicated entirely to the stuff we do beyond Black Rock City, including our own programs like Burners Without Borders, affiliated independent things like Regional Events, and even non-Burning Man stuff we like and want to highlight. News and Opinion are self-explanatory, and the Philosophical Center is where we hash out Burning Man values and principles. In the grid view for browsing stories, each story’s categories are clearly displayed on a red tag in the corner. These show you the specific topics in each story at a glance.

This section architecture is going to make an enormous difference for how our organization communicates, too. As the organization matures and finds its footing as a nonprofit, our departments are starting to map pretty well onto the headings of our global storytelling instead of just reflecting pure city planning logistics. We’ve got teams dedicated to Burning Man Arts, Regionals, and the various other top-level programs, and those teams will now be able to have more editorial control over their sections and drive their constituents straight to relevant stories. That will free up lots of bandwidth in Comm Team brains to concentrate on the News section, to shepherding the diverse and disparate kinds of content in the Black Rock City section, and to moderating comments, which… is an area with room for improvement.

But I don’t think I can overstate how much of an improvement the Burning Man Journal is already. Now that my role at Burning Man is as a general member of the Comm Team instead of a content strategy specialist, I can think holistically about our publishing platforms and how they serve our participants. I am committed to making Burning Man’s online spaces uplifting and enjoyable, as well as informative.

Just like Black Rock City, our virtual spaces should be transiently habitable zones of Radical Inclusion, Communal Effort, and Civic Responsibility. All the other Principles, matter online, too, but these three are the ones I feel most responsible to promote as an editor. Burning Man is now everywhere, all the time, and its participants are all cultural ambassadors. Now we measure how good of a time we’re having by how much good we’re doing, and our ecstatic Burns around the world are there to constantly raise the bar for our imaginations. The Burning Man Journal is going to reflect all those stories right alongside the weird desert mythologies of how we got here. I’m proud to say we’ve finally got a publication capable of doing that job.

We owe this launch to our designers, Silvia Stephenson and Tanner Boeger, and our developers, Andrew Lowe and Masha Oguinskaia. We all worked together on burningman.org, too, and it was a pleasure to keep this experienced team together and build something with fewer cooks in the kitchen this time. With the Journal, we got to build exactly the site we wanted, and the Tech Team executed flawlessly. Not only did they nail the features and the design, they bent over backwards to build us the CMS tools the Comm Team needed, and even the ones we merely wanted but surely could have lived with out. We didn’t have to. Thank you.

Thanks from the bottom of my heart to the Comm Team. This is the best team I’ve ever been on before. Megan Miller, Communications Director and best boss in the world, thank you for turning us loose to spend so much team energy on this redesign. I know you know how critical it is to our objectives, and that’s why I’m all the more grateful for the trust you put in Will and me to do it right.

Will Chase, I don’t say this enough: THANK YOU for the opportunity to put all my work into making Burning Man happen. Reading your work is what convinced me I needed to get Out There in the first place, and you were the one who decided my writing and editing could help out the cause, too. And now look at that blog. Look at how good all that old stuff looks. Whatever lies ahead for Burning Man, it’s your storytelling that will always remind us how we got here.

Finally — and this is the part where it gets truly trippy for me — I want to thank the Burning Man founders who entrusted us with this job of figuring out how to retell the story that is originally theirs. To Marian Goodell, thank you for keeping us on task, for your relentlessly good taste, and for giving us the go-ahead to do this at all. And to Larry Harvey, I’m glad you liked my joke site titles. Thanks for giving us the space to get weird, and for showing us the lifetime of good stories that can follow from one blind date with reality… if you take it to the right place.

People who follow me on Twitter — if they’re even active on Twitter anymore and give half of a damn whom they’re following — may be slightly annoyed to learn that I’ve monkeyed with my accounts again, changing the terms of that sacred deal they made when they clicked that baby blue ‘Follow’ button. I’ve split my streams into multiple accounts (and decided for my followers which one they were following), and anyone who doesn’t like it is gonna have to click a couple buttons today.

And I would just tell them that, and I would tell them there, but I’ve started to feel like The Internet might be able to enjoy something about my Twitter paroxysms, to see something of Itself in them.

Maybe It has also been perplexed by Its ongoing relationship with Twitter, unrecognizable from the one It had six or eight years ago, so much dimmer and weirder now. Perhaps It, too, wants to pull the relationship up by the roots and start again, and perhaps I can inspire that. Or perhaps not, and I’m shouting into the void again, in which case it doesn’t matter that I’m spending my coffee time typing this, and who hasn’t wasted a little coffee time typing something to post on the Internet to be ignored?

Have Me on Your Tech Podcast!InternetJon MitchellTue, 29 Sep 2015 17:05:38 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/have-me-on-your-tech-podcast50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:560abfb9e4b0ea65aaca4f8bThe conversation about where technology is taking us has guided my entire
life. I’d love to talk about it with you.This feels slightly gross, but whatever. This is the internet. I’ve been trying to finagle some press in subtler ways, but it hasn’t been working too well, so I’m making a broader, blunter appeal. I do need to juice the techy side of my audience a little bit, it’s true, but mostly I just really love to talk about technology. I listen to tech podcasts during basically every errand and exercise because the conversation about where technology is taking us has guided my entire life. I’d love to talk about it with you.

These days, though, I’m on the communications team at Burning Man, which you may have heard is a pretty huge part of Silicon Valley culture. (Perhaps you heard that on ReadWriteWeb or literally any other tech publication.) After many years as a volunteer, I came on as a consultant to help them launch their first website redesign in 11 years, and after we shipped that, I became a full-fledged member of the team. In addition to technology itself, I’m happy to talk about Burning Man, what the hell it is, why it was the subject of the first Google Doodle, and why the Google founders, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg like to go there.

So that’s my tech podcasting CV. My About page will give you more of a sense of what I’m like as a whole person. If you’ve got a podcast for which you think I’d be an interesting fit — or even if you don’t — I welcome you to get in touch.

Thank you for entertaining the thought of letting me entertain your listeners!

]]>Eject All Disks: A Free, One-Click Mac AppAppsJon MitchellMon, 01 Jun 2015 21:07:11 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/eject-all-disks-a-free-one-click-mac-app50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:556cc39de4b0945d5c2fc72dI made an app. It totally counts.Do you find ejecting disks from a Mac to be slightly more annoying than it has to be? I do. Clicking and dragging is annoying, pop-up messages are annoying, ejecting one disk with multiple partitions is annoying. For those of us who always work from a laptop and often have to move it around, this grinds us down a just a teensy bit more each day.

So I made an app. It totally counts, even though it's written in AppleScript.

Yes, this is the Yosemite system icon.

It's called Eject All Disks. I put it in my Dock, right next to Finder and System Preferences. When you click the icon (or type E-J into Spotlight and hit Return), it instantly and safely ejects all mounted disks without pop-ups or warnings. Ahh. Sweet relief.

]]>Eject All Disks: A Free, One-Click Mac AppVideo: What Is Technology?In Real LifeJon MitchellWed, 27 May 2015 00:01:00 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/video-what-is-technology50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:58bc5a3fb8a79bbdc67c7e85Our minds are filled with powerful technologies, and we can reprogram them
to be holy.In Real Life: What is technology?

In Real Life: Searching for Connection in High-Tech Times. A book by Jon Mitchell available now from Parallax Press.

Our minds are filled with powerful technologies, and we can reprogram them to be holy.

]]>Video: What Is Technology?The Geek’s ChihuahuaIn Real LifeJon MitchellTue, 28 Apr 2015 18:00:00 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/the-geeks-chihuahua50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:58bc59ba579fb33e05b9f52fI quite enjoyed this new mini-book by Ian Bogost, The Geek's Chihuahua:
Living with Apple.I quite enjoyed this new mini-book by Ian Bogost, The Geek's Chihuahua: Living with Apple. It helped me crystallize my burning geek rage during the Apple Watch review-pocalypse (I turned sharply against getting one, for the record). Here's one of my favorite excerpts:

For better or worse, the businessman is the hero of contemporary culture. Our hero is no longer the rock star or the pro ballplayer or the actor but rather the wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur. It’s no surprise that his manner would win out over Miss Manners in the public imagination. We rarely admit it, but we all want to be important, yet most of us aren’t. Smartphones let us simulate that importance, replacing boardroom urgency with household triviality. And even though they seem like populist devices, smartphones can never fully shed their origins as rapacious instruments of executive grandstanding. There will always be something rude about smartphone use, because smartphones allow us all to play the role of a cultural paragon we didn’t choose, one we may even despise, but one whose influence we can’t disavow. Rather than blackening our lungs like yesteryear’s handheld devices, today’s blacken our hearts.

You can see why I'm into this, I hope. Bogost totally gets the disconnect between the technological and sociological tentacles of the late-capitalist octopus, because he's equal parts a scholar of each. It's definitely worth picking up the e-book; you can get through it in a single concerted reading effort.

Just a couple times throughout the book, I found myself bristling at little jabs about Apple People. Don't get me wrong, the vast majority of them resonated, but I think there is something slightly more beautiful in the heart of a classic Mac child like myself, as opposed to a teen or adult who chose to become a fan later. I'll have to write more about that to convince somebody like Bogost that I'm not just being a lemming, which I freely grant that I usually am.

]]>The Geek’s ChihuahuaMeditation: There’s an App for ThatIn Real LifeJon MitchellThu, 23 Apr 2015 19:23:00 +0000https://jonmitchell.net/work/meditation-theres-an-app-for-that50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:58bc5918893fc04255a5a885Two students at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, Maria Weber and
Nicholas Gifford, just completed their senior project, “Meditation: There’s
an App for That”Two students at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, Maria Weber and Nicholas Gifford, just completed their senior project, “Meditation: There’s an App for That”. It’s a multimedia investigation of the benefits of drawbacks in mixing technology into meditation practice. Check it out at modernizedmeditation.com.

Here’s the trailer video:

The project interviews a bunch of thinkers who fall all over the spectrum of loving and hating the effects of tech on meditation, including one with me. Guess where I fell? (I took it as a trick question, of course.) Here’s my section:

]]>Meditation: There’s an App for ThatIRL in Utne ReaderIn Real LifeJon MitchellThu, 26 Mar 2015 23:41:00 +0000http://www.utne.com/mind-and-body/communication-technologies-ze0z1503zcwil.aspx50537478e4b0e1565e12dbbc:50a81bb8e4b08982a9ab19a0:58bc58688419c2e3d2c21d57I’m thrilled that Utne Reader asked to publish chapter 3 of In Real Life
as an excerpt in their March 2015 issue.I’m thrilled that Utne Reader asked to publish chapter 3 of In Real Life as an excerpt in their March 2015 issue. That’s the chapter called “Technology and Spirituality” in the book, and to stand on its own, they’ve retitled it — very well, in my opinion — “Using Communication Technologies Mindfully.”

It’s tempting to think of the Internet as a place. We’ve learned to relate to it as a world on the other side of a window. We open the window, see this virtual world on the other side, and we can just barely reach through using these strange controls we’ve learned to manipulate. We can’t enter with our whole bodies and walk around the place—not yet, anyway—but in order to access the Internet, we do have to go there. When we turn our attention back to the physical world, we leave the Internet. It makes sense that the Internet feels like a place. That’s how we’ve designed it.

Even though we can just barely reach into this apparent world with the surface of our fingertips or the sounds of our voices, software companies have built features on the Internet that give it one of the most important qualities of our frequently inhabited places: other people. Even if we were skeptical of the Internet’s placeness at first glance, it’s impossible not to be drawn in when we see other people moving around in there, talking, and taking pictures. This sensation makes it easy for us to imagine the Internet as some kind of game full of other players, with rules much simpler than those of everyday life. (And for millions of players of massive multiplayer games, it is exactly like that.)

But clearly the Internet placeness is a metaphor. It may feel like everyone in a comment thread—or even in a virtual dungeon full of goblins—is in the same place together, but it’s not true. The others probably left their message an hour ago and are back to work by now. Even if anyone else is present at the same time, it’s not as though they’re in a room with you. They’re looking at a different instance of the same data rendered somewhere else. You’re communicating through a long, byzantine contraption from two different places.

But that doesn’t make your shared experience any less real. You’re both having experiences as real as any other. But the experience isn’t taking place in the Internet. It’s taking place in your body as you interact with the information on the screen. A real place provides an embodied experience. Even if you were in a three-dimensional virtual reality environment projected into a helmet, you’d still be in the same place as you would be if the power went out and the helmet blinked off.